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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE VIGIL 



Rev. ABRAHAM YOHANNAN, Ph. D. 
Columbia University 



NEW YORK CITY 

1910 






Copyright 191 o 
by 

Abraham Yohannan, Ph. D. 



CI.A275178 



PREFACE. 

The following notes have been taken from 
addresses which I have delivered from time to 
time in Columbia University and before the 
members of my Oriental congregation. 

Abraham Yohannan 
of Persia 



Columbia University. 
New York City. 



I. 


Annunciation. 


II. 


Nativity. 


III. 


The Magi. 


IV. 


The words of Jesus. 


V. 


He is fairer. 


VI. 


He is perfectly beautiful. 


VII. 


On temptation. 


VIII. 


On the expulsion. 


IX. 


Balaam. 


X. 


Blessing and cursing. 


XL 


One day equals one life. 


XII. 


A preferable choice. 


XIII. 


To be great is to be simple. 


XIV. 


The full satisfaction of the soul 


XV. 


A shining life. 


XVI. 


The Lord's Prayer. 


XVII. 


The lillies. 


XVIII. 


A sure rest. 


XIX. 


Love of God and love of man. 


XX. 


Jesus sleeping. 


XXI. 


The Mount of Temptation. 



XXII. 


The Master and the disciple. 


XXIII. 


A touch of life. 


XXIV. 


A touch of life (continued). 


XXV. 


The penitent woman. 


XXVI. 


The real joy. 


XXVII. 


The Shepherd of the sheep. 


XXVIII. 


The personal attractiveness 




Jesus. 


XXIX. 


Longing after God's presence. 


XXX. 


The kingdom of God. 


XXXI. 


The disciple whom Jesus loved. 


XXXII. 


Stephen. 


XXXIII. 


The offspring of God. 


XXXIV. 


Revenge. 


XXXV. 


A good soldier. 


XXXVI. 


The shadow of things. 


XXXVII. 


Christ the savour of death j 




savour of life. 


XXXVIII. 


A deep-rooted love. 


XXXIX. 


A call to arms. 


XL. 


The fidelity of St. Luke. 


XLI. 


The unity of the law. 


XLII. 


Loving without seeing. 


XLIII. 


The white stone. 


XLIV. 


A vanishing figure. 


XLV. 


Time for vigilance. 


XLVL 


Time for work. 



of 



and 



I. 

ANNUNCIATION. 

"And the angel came in unto her, and 
said: Hail, thou art highly favored, the 
Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among 
women." Such a salutation from an angel, 
sent on his errand by God, distinguishes Mary 
from all the rest of her sex, and lifts her higher 
in our esteem and veneration than any other 
of womankind. Beautiful with the graces of 
a holy womanhood, of all the maidens of the 
earth, the Holy Ghost chose not a daughter of 
empire, in a luxurious palace, but the Blessed 
Virgin Mary to be his sanctuary, and honored 
her lowly estate with the Motherhood of the 
Messiah. The memory of this blessed mother, 
so illustrious in her modesty and meekness, so 
hallowed by suffering, for the sword of anguish 
pierced her soul as the spear pierced the side of 
her Son, remains to us singular in its loveliness. 
Among women she is solitary in her sacred fame. 

As far as we catch glimpses of her character, 
on the sacred pages, it seems retiring and re- 
3 



served. Her face is veiled, not made conspicu- 
ous in God's holy word. Yet, herein lies the 
rare excellence of her example. Before the 
daughters of the Church she stands a pillar of 
light, glowing in the grace of meekness, called 
by St. Peter the comely ornament of her sex. 

If sometimes we long to know more of the 
Blessed Virgin's life, we nevertheless almost re- 
tract the wish at once. That saintly figure, with- 
drawn and standing in the shadows of the sacred 
scenes in Gospel history, gazing silently, in awe 
and love, up at the face of her most holy Son, 
and catching His golden words with a devout 
attention, teaches more effective lessons to our 
souls than if we saw her in a nearer and more 
prominent place, moving actively among the 
great events she witnessed. Without a paradox, 
her silence is her eloquence. In her significant 
humility lie the force and beauty of her pattern. 
Her attitude of meek attention is full of feeling — 
wise discourse. There is speech in that look of 
earnest thought, and that fixed gaze of adoration. 
Her soul, absorbed in heavenly themes and full 
of humble reverence and godly fear, is rapt in 
love, and we see in her the model of her sex, the 
holiest and purest, the better Eve and mother of 
a better Abel, blessed among women. 
4 



We shall find the brief records of her life 
rich with the material of edification. The small 
verse of our text is as a casket holding a costly 
jewel. 

What grace, what loveliness and sanctity- 
were united in her that she should be chosen 
of the Almighty to be shrine of His divinity, 
temple of the substance of the God-man! We 
should honor her for the gentleness of that 
humble and beautiful submission which replies 
to the angel who foretells her destiny: "Behold 
the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me, ac- 
cording to thy word." We should honor her 
because God highly honored her by making her 
the sanctuary of the Holy Ghost. We should 
honor her because she was the casket of the 
brightest jewel of the universe, because she be- 
came the mother of our blessed Lord, the 
Saviour of the world. Do you know why 
Hannah chanted an ode of exultation and 
thanksgiving over the birth of her Samuel? And 
why, under the regimen of judges and dynasties 
of kingdoms, down through the centuries of the 
old economy, every Jewess longed so intensely 
for the dignity and joys of maternity? It was 
that, haply, far or near, she might be mother 
of the Messiah. No glory, gift of heaven, could 
5 



hallow mortal woman more than that of mother- 
hood to the world's Saviour. And her prophetic 
tongue told truly, therefore, that all generations 
should call the Virgin blessed. We should 
honor her for her careful observance of her 
Son, and exemplary meditation of His words. 
We should honor her for the unspeakable sor- 
rows which pierced her soul in all His suffer- 
ings, and for that constancy of faith which 
clung to His cross in His desertion, nor doubted 
His divinity, when His disciples were con- 
founded. 

Who does not feel what a privilege it were 
to sit for an hour and to look upon the breathing 
purity, the matchless tenderness of the Virgin 
who bore and nursed the Saviour of the world! 

The pencil of fine art, through, the ages of 
its exercise in the fingers of Giotto or Cimabue, 
of Correggio or Raphael, has delighted to hal- 
low their genius by portraying the Virgin in 
the various circumstances of her history — a 
nimbus encircling her beautiful head, a lily of 
chastity in her hand, a star on her shoulder as 
she gave birth to the light of the world, a robe 
of blue and red expressing her heavenly devo- 
tion and love; her divine child usually held in 
6 



her arms, for He was the fount of all her grace 
and honor. 

So impressive the story of her life, the ex- 
ample of her graces, that she has exerted im- 
memorially a salutary influence on the minds of 
her sex through the Christian world; and the 
poet of the twelfth century has exquisitely de- 
scribed that influence in the line: "The Virtues 
of the Maiden made other ladies fair." 

Her name Mary, whether for her griefs in- 
terpreted, as by St. Ambrose, "the bitterness of 
the sea," or by Isidore of Seville in the seventh 
century, Stella Maris, star of the sea, because 
her Son was "the light of the world" — her name 
has been given in baptism to thousands through 
the ages of our era. Though but a name, it is 
to us the image of sanctity shrined in beauty. 
We hardly know which most to feel for her 
— admiration or veneration or love. 



II. 

NATIVITY. 

Corr£GGio paints the infant Jesus, with Mary 
and Joseph looking on in wonder, as lying in the 
stable, bright with glory, the very centre whence 
radiates all the light that shines upon their coun- 
tenances and cheers an otherwise dim scene. 
This was truly "a light to lighten the Gentiles, 
and the glory of the people Israel." 

Many were going to and fro in the inn at 
Bethlehem; disquietude and haste were there; 
they were unloading camels ; caravans were 
making up their complement of passengers; the 
divan was motleyed with a spectacle of various 
costumes; barter, wrangling, mirth resounded. 
But hard by in a stable there was joy too deep 
for words, and silent adoration seemed to ex- 
clude the busy world, for Mary bent over her 
only-born, lying in a manger. Her head and 
Joseph's overflowed with bliss and angels gazed 
down upon the mystery of the holy incarnation. 

The soul of man is like a noisy caravansary, 
8 



full of turmoil and unrest. But when Jesus is 
born there, when He enters and abides there, He 
reduces it to order and calms it to peace; and, 
though it move among the excitements and con- 
fusions of life, it has an inner stillness which 
they cannot invade or disturb. The King of 
Peace dwells there. 

But Herod was troubled; Jerusalem was also 
troubled with him at the birth of the Prince 
of Peace. The tyrant unchained his ruffian war- 
riors to massacre hundreds of innocent martyrs 
in cold blood. These hecatombs of infants were 
the first to bleed for Jesus, to redeem His life 
with theirs; God accepted the unpolluted sacri- 
fice, their baptism of blood, and crowned them 
in paradise, foretasting their reward. It was a 
chapter of the Epiphany. The unwitting and 
unwilling tyrant wrote with his sword, wrote 
in blood, with lives for letters and with wounds 
for punctuation, an eloquent preface to the 
Gospel, published and read abroad long before 
evangelists were taught or apostles consecrated. 



III. 

THE MAGI. 

Who shall say how long in their eastern 
home the Magi watched for this blessed Epi- 
phany in the heavens? How from their watch- 
towers they gazed forth upon the sky by night 
and day, wistfully yet untiringly, with patient 
eyes and hoping hearts? The heart of the un- 
believing wearies, if its joy be deferred. It says, 
my Lord delays His coming. 

The ages marched on, the sages waited. A 
lesson, the calm, the beautiful lesson of patience, 
had been learned — of awaiting with quiet ac- 
quiescence the will and hour of God. At length 
the time ripened. Redemption dawned on the 
nations. The signal fire burned in the heavens, 
and the wise men came to adore. 

The word of God is close to thousands, and 
like the dumb beasts feeding in the stable where 
the Incarnate lay, they are unconscious of His 
advent. 

"In all the religious orders of the ancient 
heathen world, there was somewhat of a scien- 
10 



tific and of a philosophic spirit. Their temples 
were colleges as well as shrines. The Magi, 
also, were learned; but their spirit was not dis- 
tinctively the scientific. They were philoso- 
phers; but their spirit was not distinctively the 
philosophical. Science seeks for law in natural 
phenomena; and, finding it, seeks no further. 
Philosophy seeks for abstract truth, a mere 
notion of the mind. There is a spirit that avails 
itself of science and philosophy for an end be- 
yond either, aspiring to the highest mysteries; 
a spirit that would pierce into the secret of the 
Being who is above nature, and who gives to 
truth, reality. Something of this spirit was the 
distinguishing characteristic of the Magi." 

It is impossible for our souls to be satisfied 
without finding our Lord. His light floats, it 
moves before us like the star before the 
Magians, attracting our souls by its beauty, 
guiding us onward, still onward through the 
devious paths of life's pilgrimage, till it rests, 
at the close of our career, not over the cradle 
of Immanuel but before the throne of God. 

Let us follow Christ from Bethlehem to Cal- 
vary with constant patience, from worship at 
the manger to weeping beneath the cross; from 
the rough cradle to the rougher cross. 
11 



IV. 

THE WORDS OF JESUS. 

"Never man spake like this man." The 
words of Solomon were gracious, but the efflu- 
ences of his inspiration, compared with the 
riches of the mind of Jesus, are but the trick- 
lings of rivulets, to the exhaustless treasures of 
the clouds and the sea. A seraph plucked a 
live coal from the altar, and laid it on the lips 
of Isaiah, purging his sin; and the pages of this 
prince of poesy glow and burn with images of 
the humiliation, the conquests and the blessings 
of our Redeemer. 

Men may shout with excitement at the 
speeches of orators, or applaud the sallies of 
wit and of mirth, or drink with the fatuity of 
a morbid thirst the melodies of poisonous verse; 
yet our sane souls feel the grace, the kindness 
and mercy of the words of Jesus. We admit 
them without qualification and without reserve. 
They come to us with the commendation of fault- 
less truth, breathing their own inward divinity, 
transforming our frailty into virtue and our de- 
generacy into holiness. 

12 



Notice that marvelous sermon on the mount, in 
whose clear light the ethics of China and Persia, 
of Greek schools and Roman moralists fade as 
the stars at sunrise, and from which, too, our 
modern teachers may gather the only fit material 
for the systems they call moral philosophy. But 
they have not surpassed its justice and charity; 
they have not taught fraternal and universal 
love. Though they inculcate respect for our 
fellows' rights, they have not risen to the for- 
giveness of enemies. That doctrine startles the 
savage into amazement and surprises the 
philosopher into sneers. Even if we comprehend 
its grandeur in Christendom, without a living 
grace, without subjection of our souls to Jesus, 
it is very hard to own its attractions, yield daily 
to its gentle persuasions and reduce it to practice. 
To forgive enemies, to pray for injurers, to 
bless persecutors with a pitying heart, not with 
a coerced, reluctant tongue, is Godlike. It 
is sympathy with the Jesus who implored mercy 
for His murderers ; it befits the child of God and 
is a distinction of Christians, a blessed and enno- 
bling obligation. 

It is Jesus that gathers together all the com- 
mandments of the ancient Mosaic law and the 
sentiment and teachings of the major and the 
13 



minor prophets, and fuses them into one in the 
alembic of the mind of Godhead. From them He 
distils the spirit of essential love and gives to all 
men, gives to rude simplicity, to childhood's self, 
two laws — love to God and love to man. 
These are to be the everlasting guide of man- 
kind, to fill their hearts with happiness and lead 
their steps to heaven. 

His lips spake the gracious word, then the 
doors of Paradise rolled back, and farther on 
the gates of heaven unclosed and golden homes 
of immortality, descried but dimly of old, shone 
in sevenfold light upon the eyes of faith, fur- 
nished and waiting for their guests, alluring 
souls with their ineffable delights. Ever since 
then, a fresher verdure grows upon the grave, 
and a gentler sorrow moves the mourner's tears, 
and hope is full of joy, and toil is easier, and 
holiness more beautiful. 



14 



v. 

HE IS FAIRER. 

"Thou art fairer than the children otf 
men." The 45th is among the proper psalms 
for the feast of our blessed Lord's nativity. It 
is called an epithalamium, or bridal poem, 
and may celebrate the nuptials of Solomon with 
Pharaoh's daughter. The friends of the bride- 
groom greet him honorably and sound his 
praise, and then the maids of the bride magnify 
her beauty and rejoice over her ornaments. 

Yet there are passages in the psalm which 
cannot relate to any mere man. We cannot 
say of the wise heir of David, "Thou art fairer 
than the children of men." No, a greater than 
Solomon is here. It is the bridal of the Lord 
with His church, all glorious. It is a chant of 
the renown of Jesus and the march of His con- 
quests, until he gather the nations into His king- 
dom. He is "fairer than the children of men." 

The Koran relates that guests at the table of 
Joseph's Egyptian master were bewildered at 
the young Israelite's beauty. He is a histori- 
15 



cal type of our Lord. Samuel tells us that 
David was "ruddy and of a beautiful counte- 
nance, and goodly to look on." Daniel was 
"without blemish and well favored." 

It was an attribute of our King of Kings; 
who was marred and disfigured in His humilia- 
tion; of whom Joseph and David and Daniel 
were but prophetic, and who doubtless appeared 
in the splendor of His celestial beauty in the 
opened heaven to the dying Stephen and to Paul 
on the road to Damascus. And so shall He ap- 
pear to us. He is inexpressibly beautiful now; 
beautiful in the matchless model of His holiness. 
We shall see Him hereafter also with all the glori- 
ous, external signs of His excellence, in the 
mantle of His beauty, entrancing the eyes of the 
risen and the souls of the saved;, surpassing our 
conceptions of the divinely beautiful, as the lily 
of Palestine surpassed the gorgeous, regal 
robes of Solomon. 

Neither Scripture nor tradition has transmit- 
ted to us any satisfactory representation of the 
physical beauty of our Saviour. Art has not been 
able adequately to delineate Him. That partial 
description of His person in the letter of Publius 
Lentulus, corresponding with the features of 
Jewish youth of Palestine in His day, is also 
16 



deemed only of apocryphal value. Christ's nation 
was not famed for their works of art, like those 
skilful heathen sculptors who have handed down 
to us in marble the heads of the great Greek and 
Roman orators. Nor has the effigy on a medal- 
lion in the hands of the Moslem succeeded any 
better in worthily portraying Him. Even the 
ideal by the Swiss mystic and physiognomist, 
Lavater, is but a sketch of the characteristics of 
our Lord and by no means lovely. And all the 
essays made on canvas to portray Him, by so- 
styled sacred art, seem to us weak and unworthy. 
Such a picture disdains any kind of frame. 

The representations of Christ are all failures 
because the artist can depict nothing above his 
own limited capacity of grandeur and holiness, 
for he can produce for us nothing more than his 
own frail mind can behold. For a like reason, 
no merely mortal pen, no intellect, however cul- 
tivated, exalted and enlarged, can of itself write 
down, as in the gospel, the character and the 
attributes of the God-man. None but God can 
portray the image of God. 

It seems as if earthly genius were baffled in 

every attempt to delineate Jesus, as if human art, 

aspiring to picture the God-man, were paralyzed 

by its irreverence. Every essay proves abortive, 

17 



every ideal of Him proves utterly unworthy and 
below our conception; and His just similitude 
rises as far beyond human skill as the mysteries 
of God are beyond human imagination. 

Artists gave Him the attractions of "the chil- 
dren of men;" but He was "fairer than the chil- 
dren of men." His divine loveliness was veiled 
in the simplicity of manhood. Its splendors, 
when He was transfigured, were almost intoler- 
able to the eyes of His disciples; and the bright 
vision was in mercy clouded when He was so 
marred by misery that He had no form nor 
comeliness. His was the unearthly beauty that 
wakes not passion. It was said that devotion, 
lifting the heart heavenward, gave a rare beauty 
to Jewish maidens. His was of the interior soul, 
whose outlook chained His disciples, as when 
Mary sat rapt at His feet by the charm of its 
celestial sanctity, the attributes of the Son of 
God and the graces of the Son of Mary, in the 
harmony of their ineffable combination. 



18 



VI. 
HE IS BEAUTIFUL. 

"Thine eyes shau, see the King in His 
beauty." In every soul, the most refined and 
the most simple, there is an admiration of 
beauty. And since it charms us in His creatures, 
why should we not regard it with delight in 
Him who is the divine source of it all? The 
presence of God, for whom we thirst, is beauty. 
The eye loves beauty and in God is the fullness 
of beauty- The harmony in the attributes of 
God is perfect beauty. Wherever there is a 
deformity in nature it serves but to enhance 
the abounding, all pervading beauty. Who does 
not sympathize with Faber and echo his line 
when he writes: "O God, how beautiful thou 
art!" We are happier for a vision of beauty. 
It is wiser to be attracted by the lovely than 
to be repelled by the harsh. And it is wiser 
to attract by the lovely than to repel by the 
harsh. 

Christ is the noblest beauty of the world, the 
19 



radiance from which was made another and 
higher daylight for the world — another sun 
shining behind the sun. His beauty has repro- 
duced the types of beauty that were never in the 
world before. They shine through history with 
a lustre beyond compare. Once, indeed, when He 
was transfigured on the mountain in the presence 
of the great law-giver and the translated seer of 
Israel, three elect apostles caught a glimpse of the 
resplendent beauty of His radiant divinity. Sim- 
ilarly we may imagine something indescribable 
and celestial in the glance before which forgiven 
Mary knelt and wept her penitent tears. And 
what His smile must have been ! His smile was 
the sunshine of His heavenly spirit on His 
human countenance. I remember once, on asking 
a friend what was his idea of God- and how God 
appeared to his mind, he answered: "As the 
smile of the universe. The smile of the Lord is 
the feast of the soul." 

Though not here nor yet do we see the King 
in all the undiminished and unshadowed fullness 
of His beauty, yet we may fancy what dignity and 
sweetness must have been throned on His brow 
and His lip, and have glowed in His glance as He 
sat at the board of Martha and Mary and Laz- 
arus. Contentment and peace and joy and love 
20 



were guests where Jesus sat. It was the radiance 
of the beauty of His soul. Students of the face 
say that, whatever the regularity of its features 
and the delicacy of its hues, it is tame and dull 
without mobility and without the power of ex- 
pression—expression of the thoughts of the 
mind, the emotions of the heart, and the senti- 
ments of the soul. 

More than four hundred years ago was 
founded an Italian school, the subject of whose 
study was aesthetics. Their aim was through the 
admiration and culture of the beautiful to reach 
the good. Still earlier, in ancient days, it was a 
well-known maxim of the Greeks that, whether 
in architecture, or in music, in statuary, or in 
painting, whatever was beautiful was emblematic 
of the good. 

Most of us have known persons who, without 
a claim to handsome features, have yet charmed 
us with the grace of their manners or fascinated 
us by their loving temperament and the riches of 
their discourse. To the forgiven sinner who hung 
gratefully upon the loving utterances of our 
Saviour's lips, to the ignorant fisherman who 
drank the revelations of His wisdom; to the 
righteous, adoring in transport the vision of His 
higher sanctity, it may be there was no thought, 
21 



no care for mere material beauty. Each knew 
not whether he or they were "in the body or out 
of the body." It was the music of His tender 
tones they heard; it was the wisdom of His in- 
comparable instructions that they listened to. In 
these there shone the ravishing beauty and the 
burning glory that emanated from His heavenly 
inmost spirit. 

Every virtue that revelation has disclosed, and 
our hearts can conceive, dwells embodied in 
His person and shines as an example for our 
study. His goodness flowed out of the essential 
love in His nature. His reverence was only His 
love looking with awe toward His Father, whose 
nature He shared; His sympathetic look on a 
blind, lame beggar or on the helpless infant with 
a soul capable of salvation or of perdition, was 
but the token of His love. His justice was His 
love, weighing merit or demerit impartially, and 
measuring reward or pain with the equity of 
infallible truth. His mercy was His love de- 
ducting from the rigors of chastisement on 
account of the blindness or feebleness of man- 
kind. His purity, white and transparent as 
a robe of light, was but the raiment of His 
immaculate and unimpassioned love. His kind- 
ness was love for our kind — a brother's love for 
22 



humanity. His dignity was the seriousness of 
love, conscious of the grandeur of its mission, 
circled by the solemnities of suffering and 
marching on that measured way, the steps of 
which His prophecy had counted to the place of 
death. His self-sacrifice was love. Its history was 
love, beginning with exile from His glory, de- 
scending to become incarnate, born of the Virgin, 
then experiencing the miseries of the wretched, 
and quaffing that deep draught from the cup of 
sorrow, needless save to love, and dying not for 
Himself or for His faults, not for sinless saints 
and friends, but snatching from the records of 
eternity a glory unrivalled in the universe, to be 
an expiation of His enemies. 

All the charms of virtue were in "the beauty of 
holiness" ere He "humbled himself to be born 
of a virgin," because He was "light of light, very 
God of very God," the only divinely begotten, 
"of one substance with the Father." Well might 
royal wisdom, in a song of songs hymning the 
nuptials of Christ and His Church, lavish on the 
portrait of His beauty the luxurious images of 
the Orient and yet fall as far short of the glory of 
the original even as the pictures of the senses fall 
below spiritual sublimity. In "the land very far 
off," where the redeemed may enter, — there art 
23 



Thou in all Thy beauty, O Jesus lover of our 
souls, and we shall see Thy face, O King of 
Kings. 



24 



VII. 
ON TEMPTATION. 

Temptation is the test of grace; its issue 
determines our fidelity. To anticipate a period 
when the seduction and the trials will terminate, 
is to await an era of happiness that is destined 
never to dawn upon the declining world. A 
life without temptations would be at once incon- 
sistent with the object of our creation and the 
character of our existence. The chimera of think- 
ing otherwise is in itself a destructive temptation. 
It leaves its infatuated victims unguarded against 
the assults of sin. Only when we anticipate an 
encounter with enemies do we arm in defense 
against their attacks. A sentinel who slumbers at 
his post may perish ; and grace will die in the soul 
that fails to watch. In all temptation to evil 
there is an element of falsity. We are deceived 
and beguiled by the specious. In truth is life, in 
falsehood death. An ignis fatuus, a false light, 
leads the peasant in pursuit till he sinks into the 
morass. 

Man without God is weaker than the fiend, 
25 



and forsaking God he becomes the ally of evil. 

All the happiness we enjoy is a reason for 
our trust in God, and all our misery a reason for 
our distrust of Satan. 

Do not venture to trifle with temptation; the 
bird that gazes on the serpent's glittering eye 
is fascinated till it loses the power of flight. 

Rome's great captain paused and hesitated 
before he crossed that little stream, the Rubicon ; 
upon the passage of that boundary hung the 
fate, the future of his country. 

The first step is momentous; nay, every step 
has its definite and decisive effect upon our 
destiny. A resolute and quiet resistance of one 
temptation diminishes the power of each suc- 
cessive temptation. 

Turn the mind at once to Jesus and fix it on 
Him; to whose calm purpose temptations were 
as harmless as fragile missiles hurled against a 
rock. This is the way to turn our water into 
wine. Remember, it is not you who are to con- 
quer, but He who is to conquer in you. All 
the hostile elements are made tributary to His 
final triumph. Hang upon Him, and if you 
perish, perish where none ever perished before, 
at the feet of His mercy. 
26 



O, what wheels within wheels of temptations 
are continually revolving around us ! But one 
day the battle will be over, the life of the camp 
will end, we shall leave the tents of the warriors 
for rest. 



27 



VIII. 

ON THE EXPULSION. 

Li^E in the garden on the banks of the Pison 
and Gihon, the Hiddekel and Euphrates was 
healthful, peaceful, joyous. Its grounds were re- 
freshed with dews, not desolated by tempests. 

From the lips of the innocent and immortal, 
as from the cups of flowers, the incense of 
devotion arose. Gladness, not weariness, waited 
on toil. There was no dread in the thought of 
God, but endless attraction. Morning after morn- 
ing the sleepers waked to greet the light, zealous 
for His service. Heaven was on earth. Its 
tenants were at once with God. Immortality 
was the endowment of innocence. 

In creatures sublime as Adam and Eve, fresh 
from their Maker's hand, with no depraved 
tendency, a longing after knowledge and pleasure 
seemed in itself both innocent and elevating. 
But God would have His children find His hap- 
piness in serving Him and feeding on the tree 
of life. 

Knowledge is like a sword which may deliver 
28 



or destroy, or like riches that may corrupt or 
bless. The term philosophy means a love of 
wisdom rather than the wisdom, an experiment 
and not experience. 

In the first of Dubufe's two great moral 
pictures, the Innocence and the Expulsion, the 
garden by the Tigris was beautiful with verdure 
and flowers, where the lower creatures lay in 
quiet trust of their lords, and the faces of the 
unfallen pair were lovely with the innocence 
that seemed a reflection of the serene sky 
above them. Their sin transformed the scene. 
In the second, the Expulsion, the beasts flee in 
rage and fright, the sky is black with tempest, 
and pours the chill torrents of the clouds down 
upon the cowering culprit, miserable pair. 



29 



IX. 

BALAAM. 

From the pinnacle of prophecy, with the eye 
of a seer, Balaam could trace the posterity of 
Israel in their victories, their possession of 
fertile Canaan, their multiplication until they 
equaled the stars of the sky in number; and 
when, at one glance, he embraced this vast 
and happy progeny and their honored ancestor, 
dying crowned with years and conscious of his 
increase, he cried out: "Who can count the dust 
of Jacob, and the number of the fourth part of 
Israel? Let me die the death of the righteous, 
and let my last end be like his !" 

However willing to earn the rewards of un- 
righteousness, Balaam could not curse, because 
the Spirit of God withheld him. His moral 
attributes were his own, but his inspiration was 
under the control of God, so that instead of a 
pagan's curse upon the people of God, we have, 
in the rhythmical lines of exquisite poetry, a 
benediction of Israel. 

This renegade prophet was found in the ranks 
30 



of the Midianite host, and the text is his epi- 
taph : "Balaam, also the son of Beor, they slew 
with the sword." As his eyes dim in death, his 
courtly honors seem also shadows and the gold 
he craved loses its lustre. 

How vastly better if he had lived in steadfast 
humility and devotion in his house at Pethor, 
with God and the angels as tenants of its 
chambers, and his head crowned in death with 
the glory of the seer and the righteousness of the 
saint ! Infinitely better to breathe our last with 
principle and poverty than with wealth in apos- 
tasy. If a Roman, whose courage was his virtue 
and whose patriotism his pride, could exclaim: 
"It is sweet and comely to die for our country." 
Shall not the lover of God and follower of 
Christ cry, though in straits and destitution, 
above all else: "Let me die the death of 
righteous ?" 



31 



X. 

BLESSING AND CURSING. 

"BLESSED IS HS THAT BIASSED THE#, AND 
CURSED IS H£ THAT CURSED TH££." How Can 

we pray ? We cannot pray to God with hatred in 
our hearts, or a curse upon our lips — since God 
is love. The curse would wither prayer. "He 
prayeth best who loveth best all things both great 
and small." And a prayer which implies fellow- 
ship with God requires the concord of our spirits 
with the Spirit of God. 

It has been sometimes observed that imple- 
ments devised for inflicting capital punishment 
have been used for the execution of the 
inventors. It is also true that men's blessings 
or their curses often return upon themselves. 
The idea is involved in the text. In some sense 
we are ourselves the authors of our fortune or 
our fate. As he who shoots his arrows at his 
foes sees arrows hurtling back, the man that 
scatters maledictions on the world discovers 
that they rebound upon himself and finds that 
32 



hostility to others engenders hostility to ourselves. 

If a wrong deed be done us, banish retaliation. 
It doubles the wrong and makes two evils where 
but one existed. There is pain enough and harm 
enough already. Let us not increase the sorrow 
or the anguish of the world by answering curse 
with curse, but ameliorate it by our blessing, 
which softens suffering with its sympathy and 
brightens gloom as a sunburst chasing clouds 
away. We distinguish between love and wisdom. 
Yet nothing is wiser than love. 

"The soft answer turneth away wrath" as the 
music from the harp strings of the son of Jesse 
soothed the frenzied soul of Saul. 



XL 

ONE DAY EQUALS ONE LIFE. 

"And as thy days, so shalx thy strength 
be." Of the three natural divisions of time, 
determined by the circuit of the earth round the 
sun, of the moon round the earth and the rota- 
tion of the earth on its axis — of the year, the 
month, the day, choose the least, the day. 
Though least in duration, it is an epitome of the 
whole. A day is the miniature of a life. As a 
convex mirror suspended high in an apartment 
and a little inclined shows all the contents of the 
room in detail — all the persons and the appoint- 
ments, though wonderfully reduced in size — so 
the day mirrors our life. A summary of one's 
character, calmly reviewed when he is laid to 
rest and the sods of the cemetery have closed on 
his bosom, may be made from the history of an 
ordinary day — of its tempers, its habits and its 
deeds between his waking and his sleeping 
moments. With a little help of his divining 
thought one may see in the day the germs of a 
34 



lifetime. Since heaven provides for us day by 
day, it makes each day a little life. Each day is a 
pilgrimage and, without reference to the past or 
future, a cycle in itself complete. 

Jesus has bidden us in sweet and solemn 
words to restrain our anxiety for the morrow, 
since the evils of each day may suffice to itself. 
Let our solicitude be bounded by the horizon of 
night. God requires our service now, simply 
between each rising and each setting sun; if thus 
considered, how much easier is our task! It is 
a trial not for a year but for a day, then for 
to-morrow, then for the next — for each day by 
itself alone. The work between our rising up 
and lying down is not so vast that it should 
overwhelm us. Surely we can accomplish much 
within those few hours. Care for the days, the 
years will care for themselves. 



35 



XII. 
A PREFERABLE CHOICE. 

"Solomon said, Give thy servant an under- 
standing heart/' The wise and understanding 
heart wins all the rest — all else that is deserving 
of our aspirations and our efforts — what were 
all else without it? And what were long life 
without its wisdom and understanding but a 
life of imbecility, susceptible only of animal 
enjoyments. 

The fate of a vestal virgin is suggestive. 
Tarpeia, daughter of the governor of the capital 
of Rome, agreed to open the gates to the Albans, 
the besieging foes of the city, on condition that 
each soldier would give her the bracelet on his 
left arm. As the leader entered the betrayed 
citadel, he threw her his bracelet but also cast 
upon her his shield. His soldiery, following his 
example, she was buried by the accumulated 
shields and perished beneath their weight. 

The conclusion of Agur, son of Iakeh, seems 
founded on the study of man and the experience 



of years — his desire to escape the extremes of 
penury or superfluity, "Give us neither poverty 
nor riches." Nearly akin to Agur was the saint 
of Persia^ who, as a legend tells us, was visited 
by an angel and asked what gift he wished con- 
ferred upon him as a reward for his self-denying 
sanctity. Choosing neither treasure nor fame, 
nor the gratification of the senses, he replied: 
"Teach me to limit my desires by my needs." 
He did not yearn to enlarge the boundaries of 
his ambition or invent new pleasures for his 
appetites, but accounted what was necessary for 
his health sufficient for his tastes, and moulded 
his wishes into conformity with his wants. "Seek 
first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness 
and all these things shall be added unto you." 



37 



XIII. 

TO BE GREAT IS TO BE SIMPLE. 

"My Father, if the prophet had bid thee 
do some great thing woui.dst thou not have 
done it ?" It is not always necessary to cause the 
heavens to bow in executing a heavenly work ; the 
divine force may operate with efficacy, and be 
felt, when using the common elements in nature. 
Surely there was no charm in the waters of the 
River Jordan, though famed in sacred story and 
crossed by patriarchs, and used by seers, and 
hallowed since by Jesus' feet and His apostles' 
presence. 

In the truly grand in nature, in letters, in art, 
there is still the simplicity that enables the 
unschooled and the young to apprehend and to 
feel. Think of the greatest of our poets, how 
now he wins our judgment by his truth-depict- 
ing nature, now moves us to sympathy by his 
pathos, now lifts us with him as on wings to 
the regions of sublimity by the eagle-like soar- 
ing of his imagination. So, also, if not indeed 
38 



in recondite knowledge, at least in the produc- 
tions of genuine and meritorious art, in the best 
works of the painter, the sculptor, the architect, 
there is ever that divine truth, that secret har- 
mony with nature that touches the heart of a 
child. They have called art the work of man, 
nature the work of God. But the work of man 
is a faithful reproduction of the divine in propor- 
tion as it observes the principles of nature or is a 
likeness of the work of God. 

There is no character in all the records of this 
world's history so majestic as that of our Lord 
Jesus', yet none so meek, so gentle and so sweet. 
There are no utterances so sublime, no thoughts 
so grand as His in all the rolls and tomes of 
literature ; yet none more simple in their doctrine, 
despite the sophistry of men. They are like His 
life. 



39 



XIV. 

THE ONLY SATISFACTION OF THE 
SOUL. 

"I SHAIX B3 SATISFIED, WH^N I AWAK£, WITH 

Thy ukeness." A legend of the East tells of 
one that had passed hence into the unseen world. 
An angel accosted and asked what he would 
desire. He chose the gratifications of sense, 
lights and song, paintings, the music of instru- 
ments and luxurious feasting and hilarious 
companions. But sensual delights soon cloy, 
and when the heavenly messenger returned the 
surfeited voluptuary moaned that this long-last- 
ing carnal pleasure had grown unendurable, the 
years appeared interminable. Then he implored, 
as if escaping from perdition, to be allowed a 
glimpse of holy heaven and to look on the occu- 
pations of angels and saints. But the vision of 
these celestial scenes so ravished his heart that 
when revisited by the angel he declared that the 
thousand years he had passed there seemed but 
a day. 

40 



There were knights of old, counting their pro- 
fession sacred, who gave up their years — so say 
the old chronicles — in searching through all 
lands to find the sangreal, said to have caught the 
real blood from the Lord's pierced side upon the 
cross, and to have been borne in a precious ves- 
sel by the Arimathean to Glastonbury. How- 
ever honest their misled devotion, their Lord 
was ever near to them without a pilgrimage ; His 
chalice flowed in each communion. 

No earthly good can appease man's desire. 
He is immortal, his organization refuses him 
content amid created joys. So immense are the 
wants, so endless the aspirations of the child of 
God that nothing less than He who created 
them all will suffice for its felicity. It is one 
token of our kindred with the Divinity, that, 
however marred the Father's likeness in us, the 
products of His hand alone do not satisfy our 
yearnings without Himself. 

Could a single heart be made the home of all 
the transports earth can yield, they would not 
last; they soon would lose their power to charm. 



41 



XV. 

A SHINING LIGHT. 

"But the path of the; just is as the shin- 
ing LIGHT, THAT SHINETH MORE UNTO THE PER- 
FECT day." During a trip over the Zagros in 
the Kurdistan mountains, when the writer was up 
on a peak called Sipa Durig, while yet darkness 
was resting upon the mountains and was deeper 
in the vales, all forms and paths were indistinct. 
From the summit one could see the gray on the 
horizon yielding to the first faint light of dawn. 
Presently a little color streaked or suffused the 
East. A richer rose, a brighter fire, a sea of 
molten gold succeeded. An instant and the 
upper arc of the sun waved before my eyes; 
its full orb dazzled the sight ; it gilded the crests 
of the mountains ; the declivities were bathed in 
its light and, as it mounted, the valleys were 
reached by its radiance, to be greeted by the 
songs of birds and the sounds of insects. The 
traveller was no longer doubtful, nor mistook 
the objects he met, but sped on his journey 
with joy. 

42 



So the grace of the divine sun sheds on the 
path of the just its rays of truth and righteous- 
ness, and love and peace burn with a brighter 
intensity, shine more and more until the noon of 
perfect day. 

Next I was struck with the flashes of the bril- 
liancy of the sun when it was about to sink 
below the horizon, and the pale and lingering 
light after setting. I can never forget the 
lustre and the beauty. It shines upon my imagi- 
nation with a manifold splendor ever since. 

"The sweet remembrance of the just shall 
flourish, even when he sleeps in dust." 



43 



XVI. 
THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

The Lord's Prayer — that form, how expres- 
sive, how comprehensive, how complete, yet how 
simple! On its wings the soul is lifted untram- 
meled and serene to God, as if it verily insured 
His presence, and embodied Him to our faith. 
Model of devotion. It is Jesus who breathes in 
us as we offer His own dictated words. As it is 
His, He joins with us as we pray His prayer. 

A prayer is an epistle to heaven, and no earthly 
correspondent has ever answered us from afar 
with such fidelity and certainty as He. He is 
"more ready to hear than we to pray." He 
"gives more than either we desire or deserve." 

There was, among the pagan Greeks and 
Romans a species of divination by the flight and 
cries of birds. The augur was not satisfied with 
a merely preparatory performance of his super- 
stitious rites; after he had covered his head, 
marked out the heavens with his staff and 
uttered his prayer, he remained at his post to 
44 



watch the first appearance of the birds. He 
looked for a definite result. Some Christians, 
with the truth of God on their side, fall behind 
those heathens in the earnestness of their faith. 
They expect no certain benefit from their prayers. 
They do not await the benediction insured 
them by the promise of God to every true peti- 
tioner in the name of Jesus, and they fall into the 
mental habit of disconnecting prayer from its 
effect. 

The real prayer goes to heaven, bound to find 
acceptance and "returns in answer of almighty 
power, as moisture goes up in vapor and returns 
in rain. Supplication, when it is according to 
scriptural conditions, commands divine interposi- 
tion. Prayer is waiting for and welcoming the 
blessing as a returning stream from the heart of 
God, pouring back into and through the heart of 
the supplicant. While he calls, God answers — 
there is converse, intercourse, intercommunica- 
tion. Prayer is not only speaking to God, but 
hearing Him speak in return." 



45 



XVII. 
THE LILIES. 

Th# Syriac lily, or lily of Byzantium, with its 
bright, scarlet and turban-like flowers, flourishes 
from the Adriatic to the Levant, and is in bloom 
at the season when our Lord's sermon was 
preached. 

The candidum, or white lily, grows in Pales- 
tine, and the varieties of wild and beautiful tulips 
abound there. There are also the lovely oxioli- 
rion with its slender stem and delicate cluster of 
violet flowers, and the brilliant amaryllis, with 
its white petals streaked with vivid purple. 

Look at one or other of these plants, its stem, 
its calyx and nectary, its pistil, stamens and 
anthers, its leaves and corolla of petals; look 
under the minutely discerning microscope at its 
symmetrical shape, its exquisite texture, its 
hues, its beauty — the faultless work of angels' 
fingers; the white raiment of Israel's princes, or 
the golden cloth of Solomon's attire, with its 
embroidery and embellishments betraying the 
46 



defects of the loom and the craftsman, is 
eclipsed by the flower of the field, as nature, the 
child of God, is superior to art or man's device. 

A fragment of a blossom under a powerful 
microscope will appear as a series of cells, 
ranged in perfect order, like those in a honey- 
comb, or as the stones in a tessellated pavement. 
They hold the coloring matter of the flower. At 
first there is but a single cell, where the vital 
principle of the flower is lodged. In the 
moisture and warmth the germ drew food from 
the elements around it and formed a neighbor 
cell, then added another and another, until at 
length it spread a magnificent petal, a mosaic of 
cells, surpassing the pavement in the palace or 
temple of King Solomon. 



47 



XVIII. 
A SURE REST. 

"Come unto me, all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden, and i will give you rest." 
This verse, with the two that follow, appears to 
be framed in poetical form, making a stanza 
of six lines in which the first and sixth lines 
are alike in word or thought, then the second 
and fifth, and last, the third and fourth 
agree, the parallels beginning from without and 
ending in the midst. To trace it, we should 
observe that "labor" refers to work under a 
yoke, and the phrase "heavy-laden" to the 
burden borne by a beast. Then putting these 
introverted parallels together, we might read 
the first couplet thus : "Come unto me, all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden, for my yoke is easy 
and my burden is light"; the second couplet: 
"And I will give you rest, and ye shall find 
rest unto your souls"; and the third couplet: 
"Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I 
am meek and lowly in heart." 

We feel the music in the lines, even in our 
48 



English prose. A rich or useful thought, 
wedded to verse or clothed in forms of real 
beauty, is better fitted to cling to the memory, 
and may stand before us in a moment of temp- 
tation or amid the perils of grief. This text 
is one of those dear to a devout soul and rest- 
giving to a soul sorrowing for its sins. 

It is not merely the rest which is a pleasant 
refreshment after exhausting fatigue; nor the 
rest of night after the labors of day; nor the 
bodily rest in the grave after the turmoil of life ; 
nor the rest of a soul in Paradise when its 
tribulations are over. It is the rest of a spirit 
in the consciousness of the presence of God. 

Moses failed of Canaan, but not of that rest 
of which Canaan was only a type. 



49 



XIX. 
LOVE OF GOD AND LOVE OF MAN. 

Our love of God is the original of all other 
true and holy love. Our love of man is but the 
blossom from this root, a rivulet from this 
eternal fount. We understand that it is by 
loving Him alone supremely we learn to love 
our fellows justly, and we do not wonder that 
near Him and in the contrast with His glowing 
excellence we despise ourselves for our folly and 
corruption. If there be any conflict between the 
love to Him and the love to kindred or friend, 
nail your recreant affection, though with a 
trembling hand, to the cross; jeopardize neither 
your own nor another's salvation; God will be 
loved above all things. Under His love alone 
can any other love be lawful. 

God has made man, who is the image of 
Himself, an object of regard and love next only 
to Himself. Though gold be precious, we may 
not, for the possession of it, do wrong unto a 
man, who is more precious than it and merits our 
50 



regard, esteem, and reverence only next to God. 
Such love fulfills the external law of God and all 
the laws of the great universe wherein we dwell ; 
for everything depends upon love. "Even sacri- 
fice resolves itself into love." 

There is no proof of gratitude to God more 
precious than our love to man. No visions of 
our exalted faith, no ecstacies of our enchanted 
hope, can give us such assurance of His favor, or 
so prove us to be His children in His like- 
ness, as our treading in the footsteps of His life 
and copying the deeds of His love. Of this robe 
of Christ we can touch the hem. There are ills 
which no treasures dug from the mines of Ophir 
can ever soothe; kindness is uiiuou^hl, bat : c fc a 
treasure whose enchanting power by the grace of 
God, we may wield in blessings on the hearts. 
Without this the gloss of gifts is sullied and half 
their charm is lost. 



51 



XX. 

JESUS SLEEPING IN THE SHIP. 

Hs slept, not only as an infant sleeps in 
guileless calm, as He slumbered in Bethlehem's 
stable without a thought of sin or sense of dan- 
ger. It was not the sleep of Jonah in the Levan- 
tine storm, heavy because an opiate dulled his 
sense in the midst of perils, but nature's 
Master, as the God-man sleeps, holding the ele- 
ments of creation in His grasp and making the 
univ^r 5t f-ei::e. The tSSSS& and confusion of 
the moment roused Him not. 

The great Roman who gave his name to dynas- 
ties of emperors said to his trembling comrades 
on a tempestuous voyage: "Why fear? You 
carry Caesar." As if a numen guarded him or 
dwelt within him, there was a presumptuous con- 
fidence in the success of his arms and the power 
of his destiny. But Christ's reproof was gentle ! 

With Noah and his family the kernel of the old 

humanity was once contained in the ark tossed 

on the waves of the deluge ; so the kernel of our 

new humanity, of the new creation in Christ 

52 



and his Apostles, was contained in this little 
ship driven on the sea of Galilee. And the 
Church of Jesus has ever resembled this 
tempest-tossed bark. The waves of the world 
rage horribly around it ; and yet it has again and 
again and always been rescued from the perils 
just ready to overwhelm it. 

By the Hindus of old the world was repre- 
sented under the image of a great ship whose 
maker and pilot was God. A like figurative 
meaning lay in the sacred ship of the Egyptians, 
full of the images of their gods and borne in 
procession by their priests. The truth embodied 
in this symbol, as we know, is recognized in early 
Christian art by picturing the Church continually 
as a ship, and the winds personified fighting 
against it. Ever more the vessel is saved from 
destruction, because Jesus is in it. Roused by the 
prayers, the earnest cry of His servants, He re- 
bukes these winds and waves before they quite 
engulf it. 



53 



XXI. 
THE MOUNT OF TEMPTATION- 

From the summits of the crags of the Mount 
of Temptation the eye is relieved only by a sight 
of the mountains of Arabia, the Dead Sea, and 
the plain of Jericho. On entering the plain one 
ascends to the left and after an hour's march ar- 
rives at Mt. Quarantania, which has received its 
name from the forty days of our Saviour's vigil 
and fasting, and from this height it is believed, 
the devil displayed to our Blessed Lord the vision 
of this world's kingdom and its glory. "It is 
an exceeding high mountain," of difficult and 
dangerous ascent. A small chapel is built on its 
top and another on a projecting rock midway 
upon its side, and nearby there are caves and re- 
cesses in the rough declivity of which, as of yore, 
hermits to-day keep their Lent, in imitation of 
our Saviour. 

Here in these wastes, howling with the cry of 
the jackal and roar of the lion, where the crawl- 
ing serpent may represent the guile of fiend or of 
54 



fallen man, the wild goat his impurity, and the 
tiger his cruelty, the gentlest Brother of our race, 
whose soul and body were the co-mate of Divin- 
ity, underwent His fierce trial for our assurance 
and example. No one more abandoned of men 
could be found on the earth than was our 
Saviour at that time. 

It was at this moment of our Lord's weakness 
after the long fast that the devil tempted Him to 
fall down and worship him. The legend of a 
covenant with Satan, of a compact between good 
and evil, of the sale of a soul for short-lived 
glory, riches, power, is an allegory daily rendered 
into fact, with this qualification, namely, that the 
victim hopes sometime and somehow to escape 
the effects of his iniquity or to purge it at last by 
a misunderstood repentance. There is only one 
escape from the worship of the devil, and that is 
the worship of God. 



55 



XXII. 
THE MASTER AND THE DISCIPLE. 

From the earliest times there have been schools 
in the East — the cradle of mankind — schools in 
Egypt, schools in Palestine, schools in Greece. 
Students of one land visited another to listen to 
the lectures of its doctors, as Plato sought the 
sages of Memphis. The youth of Moses was 
nurtured in the East and he mastered all its learn- 
ing. Hence the warning of our Saviour, the 
greatest of Eastern teachers, was salutary and 
important. Every one that is perfect shall be as 
his Master. 

There should be such correspondence of spirit 
between teacher and scholars that the pupil's life 
shall be like His. Aristotelians were known by 
their adoption of the philosophy of their master 
and their conforming to his life. The strict Py- 
thagorean was learned in the maxims of Pytha- 
goras and was a true copyist of his practices. 
"We be Moses' disciples," said the punctilious 
Pharisees. 

56 



The Hindu Krishna said to his pupil, Arjuna : 
"They whose understanding abides in God, whose 
unchangeable trust is in Him, are purified from 
all offences, are inspired by His divine wisdom. 
He is the asylum of their souls on earth and they 
rise to dwell with Him forever." 

Christ held the living picture of the Master up 
and bade His followers copy it into their own 
characters. 



57 



XXIII. 

A TOUCH OF LIFE. 

"IF I MAY TOUCH BUT HlS CXOTHES I SHAH 

BE whole." A sermon, ascribed by some to St. 
Ambrose, makes this woman to have been 
Martha, the sister of Lazarus. Another legend, 
that of the gospel of Nicodemus, calls her 
Veronica, the compassionate woman who is said 
to have given a kerchief to our Saviour on His 
way to death, the folds of which received the 
bloody impress of His features, the likeness of 
His sacred countenance. Eusebius relates a story, 
strange and full of difficulties, of two statues in 
brass, figures of Christ and of this woman kneel- 
ing before Him. They were extant at Caesarea 
Panease in the historian's time and had been 
raised in gratitude by the devoted woman in 
commemoration of her cure. So widely spread 
was the belief that these statues referred to this 
event in the Gospel, that Julian or Maximinus, in 
hatred against all memorials of Christianity, de- 
stroyed them. 

58 



If we should repeat some of the prescribed 
methods of cure, as they are recorded by Dr. 
Lightfoot, the science of our enlightened 
physicians would readily perceive how the reme- 
dies must have aggravated instead of mitigating 
the disease of the suffering woman. Here are a 
few out of many examples : 

Rabbi Jochanan says : "Take of gum Alexan- 
dria, of alum and garden crocus, the weight of 
a zurse each; let them be bruised together and 
given in wine to the woman. If this fail : 

"Take of Persian onions nine logs, boil them 
in wine and give it her to drink; and say, 'Arise 
from thy hemorrhage.' If this fail : 

"Set her in a place where two ways meet and 
let her hold a cup of wine in her hand, and let 
somebody come behind and affright her and say, 
'Arise.' Should this do no good: 

"Take a handful each of cummin, of crocus 
and of faenugreek; let these be boiled and given 
her to drink and say, Arise (as before). If 
this also fail: 

"Dig seven trenches and burn in them some 
cuttings of vines not four years old, and let her 
take in her hand a cup of wine and let her be 
led from this trench and sit down over that, and 
let her be removed from that and sit down over 
59 



another, and in each removal say unto her, 'Arise 
from thy hemorrhage." 

If by some of these prescriptions it is evident 
the patient could not have been healed, it is clear 
that by others she must have been harmed. And 
it is manifest from all of them together that 
she "had suffered many things." The expense 
attending her long illness, the cost of medi- 
caments, the number of persons employed, for 
she was not a woman of great affluence, had 
reduced her to poverty. All that she possessed 
had been wasted in the vain search for health 
and alas ! she was "nothing bettered," says the 
sacred narrative, "but rather grew worse." In 
the apocryphal report of Pilate to Tiberius, he 
paints the extreme emaciation of this woman 
from her complaint as such that the joints of 
her bones appeared as if shining through crystal. 

Since the great Physician told her afterward, 
"Thy faith hath made thee whole," we see 
that her confidence in His restorative power — 
the faith which drew her to His person and 
made her touch His garment — if not well taught 
and unalloyed, was yet most real, vivid and 
intense. 



60 



XXIV. 
A TOUCH OF LIFE (Continued). 

"Somebody hath touched Me, for I per- 
ceive that virtue is gone out of Me." There 
was no labored effort of Christ, no depletion of 
His energies, no expenditure of power which 
He must regain by tonic agencies or rest, or 
even by fresh inspirations from on high. It was 
simply an effluence of healing virtue from His 
divinity drawn forth by faith. 

In some whose bodies seem surcharged with 
magnetism there is a capability of conveying elec- 
tric streams to excited, pained or fevered forms 
with soothing, and even with healing efficacy. 
The transmission demands no credulity on the 
part of the person to be relieved, but mere prox- 
imity or a slight exertion from him who relieves. 
What is necessary, however, is always a receptive 
condition. 

It was Jesus Christ of whom St. John says : 
"In Him is life," and who says of Himself : "I 
am the life." Yet of all the crowd that swayed 
61 



around Him and pressed upon Him, the 
afflicted daughter of Israel alone, by the force of 
her faith, called forth the power of His benefi- 
cence in her bodily infirmity. If any of God's 
threatenings be the object of faith, faith takes 
the shape of fear. If a divine promise be the 
object, faith takes the form of hope. If Jesus be 
the object of faith, it takes the form of love. 

We cannot choose but concede that from Him 
flows down, flows ceaselessly, flows through all 
the universe, life with all its agencies, inspiring, 
sustaining and recuperative. From the ambient 
atmosphere we breathe His life and love. No 
nature is so rugged that the grace of God, freely 
admitted, cannot transform it. 

We cannot grasp the body of Christ, but if we 
can merely touch the hem of His love and life, 
virtue then flows out for us better than all human 
medicines to heal our infirmities. 



62 



XXV. 

THE PENITENT WOMAN. 

"A WOMAN STOOD AT HlS EEET BEHIND HlM 
WEEPING AND BEGAN TO WASH HlS FEET WITH 
TEARS, AND DID WIPE THEM WITH THE HAIRS OF 
HER HEAD, AND KISSED HlS EEET, AND ANOINTED 

them with the ointment." With a holy 
prescience of His passion she came as if to give 
Him unction and embalm His body for burial. 
She anticipated the hour as if inspired by a heav- 
enly presentiment, and well indeed, because in 
such haste was our Saviour's corpse taken from 
the cross and buried there was small time for 
embalming. The Marys came early on Easter 
morning to the tomb with spices, but Jesus was 
risen; it was then too late for this work of 
piety. 

Why is she there, a weeping penitent and per- 
haps ostracized by her sex unless to teach us 
reverence and friendship for Christ ? Why kneels 
she there, shedding showers of ceaseless sorrow 



on His stained and naked feet, by which feet no 
kneeling penitent was ever spurned? If Ber- 
enice's votive tresses, hung in a Goddess' temple 
at Cyprus, were feigned by Conon to be carried 
to the skies and made a constellation, if an apostle 
call a woman's hair her glory, why does she droop 
the luxurious beauty of her locks to this lowliest 
office and wipe the moisture from those blessed 
feet, but to teach her successors an unfeigned and 
unshamed humility as well as adoration of the 
true God-man. Why does she lavish the kisses of 
her lips, all unforbidden, upon these least honor- 
abe and most honored members of His body, 
unless to imprint on the heart a thousand burning 
mementos of gratitude for Jesus and kindle its 
affections into sympathy with her transport of 
love for the "altogether lovely." Why break the 
precious vase's neck and shed its odorous con- 
tents there, so as to anoint the bruised and foot- 
sore, or prospectively to embalm the dead, except 
to pour scorn upon a parsimonious piety, to prove 
no gift too costly, no talents too eminent to be 
consecrated to Christ? Whether He be honored 
in His Church or in His poor, it is to inculcate on 
His disciples a lesson of self abandonment to sig- 
nify that their fairest merits shall be buried in 
64 



His atonement, their surest hopes be founded in 
His mercy and their souls be offered to Him by 
an eternal devotion. 
Love much, for much has been forgiven. 



65 



XXVI. 
THE REAL JOY. 

"Notwithstanding, in this rejoice not, 
that the spirits are subject unto you; but 
rather rejoice because your names are writ- 
TEN in heaven/' One may feel longing for the 
power of miracles and yearn for some tangible 
assurance in religious matters which spoils the 
simplicity of the faith. Our Saviour does not 
encourage the enticing wish to grasp the unseen 
— the witness of the senses. The powers we 
already possess are images and reflections of the 
Deity. With such a parentage, with "names 
written in heaven," we rejoice in the unspeakable 
honor and need not ask for rarer gifts, need not 
exult in startling novelties, like taming or expell- 
ing demons. 

Thirsting for that highly estimated fame, 
whose trump is noisy, but whose voice is so often 
false, a host fell from seraph's thrones to an 
abyss of gloom. Our glory is not ours, is not 
original ; let us lay it at the feet of Christ. Since 
66 



all we are we have received, let us lose our self- 
hood in our fount of life — Him who is all in all. 
Glory not in power, possessions, or in the repute 
of a name, but glory in this, that our "names are 
written in heaven." 

In various kingdoms there was kept a book 
of life, wherein was written the birthday of each 
subject — his day of entrance into life. At his 
death, or when disfranchised for gross crimes, 
his name was stricken out. In the Lamb's book 
of life, too, there is a like record on high of 
the hour of our regeneration. 

Providence is so much wiser than we; simple 
obedience is so much safer for man. Goodness 
is better than power. It is more godlike to be 
a saint than even to be a sage. 

There are men who may not have inscriptions 
on tablets with their titles, or statues standing in 
niches, or monuments in public squares, whose 
names may not be chronicled in history and the 
tale of whose life no poet sings, but still have a 
shrine in the loving hearts of their fellows and 
their "names written in heaven." 



67 



XXVII. 
THE SHEPHERD OF THE SHEEP. 

Among the symbols on the walls of the 
chambers of the dead in the catacombs, those 
subterranean burial places of the persecuted 
saints, was that of the good Shepherd, a strong 
and lovely youth, one hand holding a crook or 
flute, the other holding the lamb that was borne 
on his shoulders. 

The portion of the allegory from which the 
book "Shepherd of Hermas" derives its title 
begins thus : "After I had been at home and sat 
down on my couch there entered a man, glori- 
ous in appearance and dressed in white goat's skin 
like a shepherd, with a wallet on His shoulders, 
a staff in His hand, and saluted me. When I had 
greeted Him in turn, He sat down beside me and 
said : 'I am sent by a Venerable Angel to dwell 
with thee for the rest of thy life.' As I feared 
some temptation and manifested my distrust, He 
said : 'Dost thou not know Me ? I am that Shep- 
herd to whom thou art committed.' Then His 
68 



figure was changed and I knew it was He, and 
was filled with grief and shame for the doubts I 
had betrayed. Then He bade me to take courage, 
that I might observe the commandments and 
similitudes which He was sent to dictate. Keep 
them, therefore, and walk in them, all ye who 
read them and hear them. For all these words 
did that Shepherd, the Angel of Repentance, 
command me to write." 

Giotto, as a youth, was a shepherd, before 
he was an artist. We have a piece from the 
pencil which depicts the pastor. The scene lies 
in the Orient. The young shepherd, with a look 
of love on his face for his flock, is playing the 
flute. Some of the sheep leave their browsing 
and stand listening to him. Others lie down, con- 
tent, and with an upturned glance, bespeaking 
their trust in their protector and guide. A shep- 
herd in the East does not follow, but precedes his 
flock, where the sheep are not driven, but led. 
They recognize his voice. 



XXVIII. 

THE PERSONAL ATTRACTIVENESS OF 

JESUS- 

There was such a charm in the personal pres- 
ence of Jesus that not only His near and chosen 
friends but crowds, unconscious of the reason, 
loved to linger by and look and listen. There 
was such resistless truth in His lessons that they 
drank them in as revelations from the skies. 
There was such love in His glance, His 
speech, His works, that His attendants were 
certain of His sympathy. All estates, all occupa- 
tions, all ages, felt the attraction. Satan and 
his followers were the exceptions. They too 
felt, but resisted His sway. 

Christ contemplates the plan of winning our 
hearts by His being lifted up from earth, by 
which we may understand either His crucifixion 
or His ascension, or both. He ascended into 
heaven not to sunder but to perpetuate the tie. 

Neither heaven nor earth contained a nobler 
70 



oblation. Neither heaven nor earth could exhibit 
diviner love. 

And this love generates reciprocal love. One 
can hardly resist the direction of His love toward 
those who truly love Him, as steel to the load- 
star. 

And since He would draw us to Him, let us 
scale the interval that parts us from heaven, and 
piercing the firmament, "in heart and mind 
thither ascend and with Him continually dwell." 



71 



XXIX. 

LONGING AFTER GOD'S PRESENCE. 

"Lord, show us the Father." The Hindu, 
dissatisfied with the fanciful myths of his clime 
and full of a devout aspiration after God, cried, 
with the anguish of an irrepressible earnestness : 
"O show me thyself." 

To look on the face of Deity was the desire of 
Semele, who besought Jupiter to visit her in the 
effulgence of his majesty. Agreeably to the 
fable, he came in clouds, in lightning, in thun- 
derbolts and she was consumed by his fires. 

Spiritual things are spiritually discerned. 
There is no vocation, no department of letters or 
learning or art in whose mysteries one can 
become an adept, or even whose terminology one 
can understand without study. We cannot know 
a person whom we neglect or shun. 

In the yearning of his unsatisfied soul for the 

eternal, the fancy of the Hindu has embodied 

this desire in feigning that there have been 

many Avatars or descents of the Deity in the 

72 



flesh. Parsis revered divinity in the emblematic 
fire and Greeks adored Apollo in the sun. 
Arabia worshipped the sun and stars, and that 
religion was called Sabean from the name of 
their land or for the honors paid to the host of 
heaven. Mythology heard the voices of deities 
in the winds, in the blasts of Aeolus or the 
breath of Zephyr. It peopled the fountains with 
naiads and the woods with fauns. Ephesus 
vaunted the jewelled image of Diana fallen from 
the skies, and Athens filled its streets with statues 
of gods of all lands. These fabulous inventions 
could only satisfy the sense; the immortal 
hunger of the soul was still unfed. 

Unless God discloses Himself, our depraved 
imaginations cannot conceive of Him aright. 
We know Him only as He discloses Himself, and 
He leads us on as we are able to follow. 



73 



XXX. 

THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

"My kingdom is not of this world." For 
its emblazoned coats of arms on banners, escut- 
cheons and panels, heraldry has borrowed its 
strange shapes, its wivern, its griffin, its unicorn, 
from those emblematic creatures of prophecy, 
those monstrous forms of beasts designed to 
figure to us the monstrous propensities that have 
ruled the minds of worldy potentates or charac- 
terized the policy of worldly powers. They 
stand, those images, for lust, rapacity, tyranny 
and terror — elements that reign over a depraved 
and fallen world. But in the kingdom of the 
saints, as under a new heaven and on a new 
earth, where the Holy Ghost presides and is 
adored, not the claws of the leopard, the talons of 
the eagle, the teeth of the bear, are our arms ; not 
jealousy or cupidity or rage or hate is our law; 
but veracity and justice, peace and love. Not 
His is the Takht Jamsheed, the material crown. 
Not His, the sword of them that "perish by 
74 



sword," the clash of arms, the mutilated limbs of 
strife, the corpse-strewn battlefield. 

The emblem of His kingdom is the dove from 
the ark, silver winged in its celestial beauty, harm- 
less, not ravenous, not with a beak tearing its 
prey or with plumage bristling for battle, but 
the guileless, gentle bird of peace — a token 
that the waves of desolation are assuaged. 

The progress of the kingdom of God is made 
not with the sling or the javelin, maiming and 
crushing human bodies and desolating human 
homes and hearts. Its elements are righteousness, 
peace and spiritual joy. What can heaven be 
more than these, save that, there beyond, the 
righteousness is eternal, the peace is eternal, the 
joy is eternal. 



75 



XXXI. 

THE DISCIPLE WHOM JESUS LOVED. 

We) cannot read these words without an inter- 
est in the man loved by Him whose love is life 
itself. His love for Christ was unobtrusive 
but profound. There is stillness, there is retire- 
ment. He is scarcely named alone or named as 
chief. So often among the first in position, he 
is quiet and unassuming. If, in the narrative, he 
is mentioned as companion of his brother James, 
then James is first, as senior : it is "James and 
John, his brother." John is present, but, if not 
silent, he is not foremost. 

When Jesus, seized by officers, was led to trial 
and no other friend stood by, this young man 
followed to the place of peril and was admitted. 
His modesty withheld his name and left us only 
that description of a faithful follower. 

The next scene of danger was the cross. Who 

would have courage to be there? St. Peter had 

denied Him and departed, weeping bitterly. St. 

James and the others had forsaken Him and fled. 

76 



But "there stood by the cross of Jesus that 
disciple whom He loved," he was present, but 
without display; he stood there, silent, fearless, 
but calm. 

And next, the tomb would be a place of 
danger ; here, John was first, first at the place of 
danger, and did outrun the impulsive Peter. 

Then there was tranquillity in his devotion 
and meekness in his reverence. St. John, by 
the instinct of his love, first recognized the 
speaker on the shore: "It is the Lord." Simon 
girt on the fisher's coat, upon hearing this, and 
plunged into the sea. The younger son of 
Zebedee remained, silent, waiting, blest and full 
of love. 

Hence we learn the character that Jesus loves. 
It is one itself full of loving devotion ; free from 
pretentious display, unobtrusive, unselfish and 
calm; fearless of consequences in the reality and 
fervor of its attachment — a soul occupied through 
life with the thought and the service of its Lord. 



77 



XXXII. 
STEPHEN. 

"And they stoned Stephen ... he kneeled 
down, and cried . . . lord, lay not this sin to 
Their charge." Amid the anguish of his violent 
death, there was the serenity of Charity in the 
soul of the saint. "To err is human, to forgive 
divine." His prayer to Jesus was again like that 
of Jesus to His Father on the cross: "Forgive 
them." With spirit molded in the lessons and 
example of his Master, he prays for his foes 
amidst their wicked torments and his most 
cruel pains. 

The words that close the chapter and the 
story are these : "When he had said this" — his 
last prayer — "he fell asleep." How sweet the 
sleep — a sleep indeed in Jesus when the last 
words are words of love. 

St. Augustine writes : "If Stephen had not 

prayed, the Church had not won St. Paul." Saul 

was guarding Stephen's clothes while being 

martyred. Doubtless he had heard the young 

78 



deacon's arguments for Jesus, irresistible with the 
eloquence of the Holy Ghost, and noted well his 
wisdom, his divine tranquillity, his fortitude, de- 
votion and forgiving charity. All the incidents 
in this spectacle of martyrdom, it may be, left 
their impress on the soul of Saul and prepared 
him for the revelation on his journey to Damas- 
cus. Bear in mind that St. Luke wrote this 
very record in the Acts under the supervision 
of St. Paul. 

Yes, the young deacon "fell asleep." His 
name, Stephanos, means crown, and he put on 
the crown of martyrdom. He died, a witness 
to the truth, the mission, the Messiahship of 
Jesus — and more to the inspiring power of His 
divine Charity, since among all the graces flaming 
in his martyr's crown, the most radiant, heavenly 
and precious is the gem of love. 



79 



XXXIII. 
THE OFFSPRING OF GOD. 

"For we' are: also His offspring." St. Paul 
enjoyed a great advantage when reasoning with 
the representatives of the several Greek schools 
gathered on the hill to hear his new doctrine 
of the Gospel, on account of his acquaintance 
with the classic authors of their clime. He 
meant to show them that he was not, as they 
suspected, "a setter-forth of strange Gods," 
as that with them would have been a capital 
crime, but was only preaching the' attributes of 
one whom, in their much veneration, they had al- 
ready honored with a place in their pantheon — 
"the unknown God." 

In his defense St. Paul quoted very effectively 
against both the idolaters and sophists of his 
audience, writers acknowledged as authority by 
the scholars of their nation and age. And many 
other thoughtful listeners, besides Dionysius and 
Damaris, must have felt the force of his logic, 
at the conclusion of his argument. Some of 
80 



the admired and oft-cited heathen poets have 
proclaimed our human origin divine. Clean- 
thes, in his hymn to Jupiter, has sung: "We are 
his offspring." The same expression was used 
three hundred years before St. Paul's time by 
Aratus, a native of St. Paul's own province, 
Cilicia, when in his book called "Phaenomena," 
he wrote of the divine being in these words : 
"We also are his offspring." 

Socrates imagined that he had an attendant and 
monitory demon, and this Greek sage sacrificed a 
cock to Aesculapius before being executed ; never- 
theless, it was he also, who almost seerlike 
proclaimed, four hundred years before the incar- 
nation, that God must come down to earth to 
enlighten us concerning His will and our destiny. 



81 



XXXIV. 
REVENGE. 

One) of the horrible sentiments of depravity 
is expressed in these few words, "Revenge is 
sweet," which might be imagined under the de- 
vice of a tiger luxuriating beforehand in the 
blood of a victim he is about to devour. Nations 
have gone to war, to avenge — as they have 
phrased it — their insulted honor, thus offering to 
private citizens a forcible example, whose imita- 
tion they punish. 

It is a law among certain uncivilized tribes 
that the kinsman shall avenge by blood a murder 
in his family, the individual hand executing cap- 
ital punishment in lieu of the state, as in the 
rude youth of this race and under a temporary 
economy of religion, the law of talio, or of like 
for like, was tolerated. 

Feuds between Arab clans are perpetuated 
from generation to generation. Fear of venge- 
ance for some murder keeps clans apart, feed- 
ing their flocks in separate pastures, and guarding 
themselves in distant camps. 
82 



Let us have nothing to avenge, and let us 
refuse to revenge ourselves. It is more heroic 
to die with patience than in wrath, like the re- 
signed Dalmatian captive who died pierced by the 
gladiator's sword in the Arena at Rome. His eye 
is clouded as the blood oozes from his ■ death- 
wound, but his soul is not clouded by a thought 
of vengeance. His thoughts are far away, with 
the wife to be widowed and the little boys play- 
ing in the woods on the borders of the Danube. 

The spirit of Christ's martyrs was a reflex of 
the spirit of their Lord. Amidst the anguish of 
the cross, Jesus did not call down bolts of wrath 
upon His foes, but prayed, "Father, forgive 
them; they know not what they do." 



83 



XXXV. 
A GOOD SOLDIER. 

"Endure hardness as a good soldier." 
There are carpet knights who know nothing of 
an army's adversities, of the cannon's din, the 
hail of balls, and the clash of steel, and know 
only of the tales of heroes and the show of glit- 
tering bannered troops in times of peace. 

Were they spiritual combatants, these could 
not teach us the lessons of religious endurance 
and earnestness. For the Christian life is not a 
parade for the admiration of spectators, not a 
sham battle without the encounter of a danger- 
ous foe, not a gala day display, but a serious 
conflict. 

An imperial guard or a legion of invincibles 
will be expected to show steadiness and endur- 
ance, a devotion to their service and feats of valor 
befitting their title. Equal obligations rest upon 
Christians if worthy of their rank; not least 
among these is the obligation to endure adversity 
with cheerfulness. 

There is a power in conviction, an inspiration 
84 



in hope. When storming the fortifications of 
Malta the besieging soldiery, in the enthusiasm 
of their assault, impetuously scaled the walls 
and possessed themselves of the stronghold, 
which, a few days after, in hours of idle indiffer- 
ence, they could not by their utmost efforts 
ascend. 

In the annals of old Greek warfare, and in 
our modern strifes, we have seen a pass between 
mountains held by a small band of heroes 
against an army of thousands, or a fort kept by a 
diminished garrison with scant supplies until the 
assailing legions, tired of their ineffectual onset, 
raised the siege. On the open field we have wit- 
nessed a single rank, bearing the shock of a supe- 
rior host, the thinned but unbroken line closing 
again and again until succor came and the tide of 
battle turned and victory remained with perse- 
verance. 

Champions of Christ contended earnestly for 
the faith. They were banished, they were 
burned, but their spiritual arms beat down the 
weapons of steel; gentle graces shamed bloody 
purposes into irresolution and won kings and 
philosophers and slaves to confess the Christ, 
and kneel before His cross and learn truth and 
love. 

85 



XXXVI. 

THE SHADOW OF THINGS. 

"For the things which ark seen are tem- 
poral, BUT THE THINGS WHICH ARE NOT SEEN 
are eternal." One sees a fata morgana in the 
air above. A landscape with its knolls and 
shrubs and brooks, or a town with its walls 
and towers, its houses, domes and spires, is mir- 
rored in the sky. It is an optical image, possible 
under certain luminous and atmospheric condi- 
tions — a reflex of a scene on the earth below. The 
vision is brief, but not more shadowy and fleeting 
than the cities we dwell in. The earth is full 
of the sepulchres of such spectral abodes. These 
crumbling phantasies are figures of a grand eter- 
nal and unseen reality. "For here," says inspira- 
tion, "we have no continuing city, but we seek 
one to come." 

Or again — a novice travelling with a caravan 

in Arabia and consumed with thirst, sees on the 

distant sands the semblance of a lake, green 

groves beside it. It ever alludes and disappoints 

86 



him as he draws near. It is but the shimmer of 
sun rays in the air reflected from the heated 
sands. 

Permeated with a sense of the transitory, in 
all mundane good, and smitten by a view of the 
puerility of ambition and the error of covet- 
ousness, the eloquent English statesman, Burke, 
exclaimed: "What shadows we are and what 
shadows we pursue!" 

Yet, let us remember, that the casting of a 
shadow implies the existence of a substance. 
There is a religious reality. "According to the 
parables of our Lord all nature is sacramental, 
our life, our being is sacramental. A sacrament 
is "an outward and visible sign of an inward 
and spiritual grace." 



87 



XXXVII. 

CHRIST, THE SAVOUR OF DEATH AND 
SAVOUR OF LIFE. 

There is a well known legend of Saint Veron- 
ica. The holy Matron, full of compassion, as 
our Lord bore His cross along the way of grief, 
gave him a handkerchief which he pressed to His 
face, wet with the blood trickling from His 
temples. It is said that he returned it to her 
and that it bore the impress of His features. If 
w T e but transpose the letters of the name Veron- 
ica, it would make Vera icon, signifying by a 
fanciful etymology, true image. 

If this tradition seeks to embalm some act 
of loving piety we have in the idea of the Wan- 
dering Jew another legend, embodying an illus- 
tration of the prolonged punishment of sin. 
Ahasuerus, for an indignity to our suffering 
Saviour, on His way to Calvary, was condemned 
to live on through wearisome ages, from whose 
dull revolution he could not escape by plunging 
into the vortices of the sea, or the crater of a 



volcano, or the carnage of battle, or the infected 
airs of epidemic plagues. 

To the soul estranged from God this life is 
hopeless and has its image in the gloom of Cal- 
vary at the crucifixion of our Lord. To the soul 
at one with Him, all life is hopeful and radiant 
with the light of the night of His birth or the 
morn when he rose from the tomb. 



89 



XXXVIII. 
A DEEP-ROOTED LOVE. 

"Being rooted and grounded in love/'' 
Palmyra merits its name for the number of palm 
trees that thrive in the waste. But the traveller 
who sees only a desert around, with neither 
spring nor stream to nourish vegetation, won- 
ders from what source these trees receive 
refreshment and vitality. Not until men had 
dug deep, deep down through the sands, was it 
discovered that their rootlets and thread-like 
fibres had penetrated to an almost incredible dis- 
tance below until they found water, which they 
drank through countless pores for the susten- 
ance of their life. The environs are like the arid 
wild of the world, offering to righteousness little 
promise of thrift. But, deeper than the super- 
ficial depth of human philosophers, far down into 
the inexhaustible font of divine love, stretch the 
thirsty roots of our religious life. 

Not only, rooted like the oak or the palm but 
90 



also "grounded in love" should be the true 
disciple and follower of Christ. 

Not because the Gnostics used such words in 
their mystic vocabulary as "length and breadth 
and depth and height," but because of the 
immensity of the love of God in Christ and the 
beauty of the vision of His self sacrifice, does the 
apostle break forth into that rapturous exclama- 
tion : "that ye being rooted and grounded in love 
may be able to comprehend with all saints what 
is the breadth and length and depth and height, 
and to know the love of Christ which passeth 
knowledge." Even then in its fullness we cannot 
grasp it, any more than Archimedes could find a 
fulcrum on which to rest his lever in order to 
move the world or our finite mind could embrace 
infinity. 



91 



XXXIX. 

A CALL TO ARMS. 

"Wherefore take unto you the whoi,E 
armour OF God." In the days when swords and 
arrows and slings were used, instead of fire- 
arms, the soldier that went to engage in conflict 
without being covered by armor risked a 
wound in the part exposed and hazarded death. 
The Romans through their unshod feet were 
pinned by the Parthian javeline to the ground. 
Homeric story tells us that Achilles was mor- 
tally wounded through his heel, the only vulner- 
able part, as his mother had held him by that 
when she dipped her child in the immortal 
stream. Through but one weak or open place, the 
joint of his armor, an arrow pierced Ahab, giv- 
ing a fatal wound. 

If toleration be granted to a single fault, we are 
no longer covered by the whole armor of God, 
and the gate is open ample enough for the en- 
trance of destruction. Let our whole heart be 
sanctified, our whole will be shielded from contact 
with evil. 

92 



Those sins which endanger each one most are 
called his well-circumstanced, or easily-besetting 
sins. They attack us when opportunity is most 
favorable — in our weakest moments with their 
greatest force — or, when we are least watchful, 
they steal with subtlety upon us, like foes in am- 
bush, and surprise the heedless into transgres- 
sion. 

Without divine sustaining grace our determi- 
nation may seem to be stout and brave, afar 
from danger in our safe retreat ; but in the front 
of persecution we may shrink or, when our zeal 
is needed, we may droop, as, when Icarus would 
fly from Crete, his waxen pinions melting in 
the sun, he fell into the sea. 

We never fall without our own consent. We 
are invulnerable except through our will. 



93 



XL. 
THE FIDELITY OF ST. LUKE. 

"Only Luke: is with Me." The accomplish- 
ments of St. Luke, elegant scholar as he was, lay- 
like the features of a lovely landscape shrouded 
by the darkness until the light of Christ, the re- 
splendent Sun of righteousness, rose on his soul 
and drew its treasures forth in heavenly beauty. 
Vale and copse, and lake and knoll, and flowered 
crevices of mossy rock, all then became illumi- 
nated. 

What a lesson is enshrined in the ministrations 
of St. Luke to the infirm, imprisoned, aged Paul, 
whom he remained with till the sword of Nero 
separated them! How affecting are those few 
words of Paul to Timothy : "Only Luke is with 
me !" What a consolation to Luke himself must 
have been this remembrance of his own fidelity, 
when borne on his heart at the latest hour of his 
life, whether he was hanged on an olive tree in 
Greece or died in the calm of his retirement, 
more than fourscore years of age. 
94 



Every gift of heaven imposes upon us an obli- 
gation. We may not have the privilege of 
serving an apostle in his imprisonment, but we 
can serve our Lord Jesus Christ through His 
humble disciple. 

The faith of the idolatrous Sabeans beheld 
God in the sun and host of stars; the Parsi be- 
held divinity in his emblematic fire, and the 
quickened soul of Christ's disciple will discern 
His image in his brother. 

God has made man, who is the image of Him- 
self, an object of regard and love next only to 
Himself. 



95 



XLL 

THE UNITY OF THE LAW. 

"For whosoever shall keep the: whole; 
law, and yet offend in one point, he 
is Guii/fY OF all/' One cannot separate one 
hue from the prismatic seven without dimming 
or distorting the pure ray of light they compose. 

Any single commandment contains in itself 
the other nine. The decalogue is a "tree yield- 
ing fruit after his kind whose seed is in itself." 
In a tree there are so many different portions; 
the tenacious roots in the soil, the sturdy trunk, 
the protecting bark, the nourishing sap, the leafy 
lungs, the blossoms of beautiful prophecy, the 
consummated fruit, with another generation of 
seed in itself, and yet all of these varied parts, 
one in essence, are wrapped up in the shell of a 
kernel or seed. Thus each commandment 
infolds the rest; it has their germs and would 
develop them under the warm breath of the 
spirit. All the ten are so blended and combined 
that they share a common essence and the 
embryo of all is found in each. 
96 



A wise Greek — Aristotle — whom, for his pro- 
ficiency, his master called a "lover of truth," 
speaking of the virtues, shows them so linked 
together that if a man possess one virtue in per- 
fection, he will of necessity possess the rest. 

It is true of the graces of a Christian char- 
acter. They are mutually dependent. Humility 
and courtesy, for instance, are but two phases of 
love. They are so thoroughly blended that per- 
fect love can never exist without either. Humil- 
ity is so essential to love that unless pride intrudes 
there is no breach of love in the world. 



97 



XLIL 
LOVING WITHOUT SEEING. 

"Whom having not s££n, ye i,ove." It is 
a fallacious proverb which avers that they are 
speedily forgotten who are out of sight. If so 
readily forgotten they were not dear; our love 
was but shallow or feigned. Absence is to love 
like wind to fire; it extinguishes the little, but 
kindles the great to a glowing, glorious flame. 
"There is no figure so colossal as that of Christ ; 
even the distance does not diminish its propor- 
tion." 

Mythology transferred its heroes' to the mate- 
rial heavens so as to immortalize them and called 
the constellations by their names; then on earth 
they turned them into demi-gods and idolatrously 
offered incense to their shades. 

What is it that we love in any person whom- 
soever? Look upon the counterfeit of his face 
on canvas. Does it waken the emotion of love? 
You may admire the skill of the artist in his 
work and, if moved by the lifelike expression of 
the picture, it is because it brings back the 
98 



original to your memory and simply suggests the 
reality of the absent or deceased, the object of 
your love. Or does the statue stir affection? It 
may reproduce the features and the form of one 
beloved, but it is cold marble, without a living 
soul, without all sense. What we see is not the 
mere personality or visible presence that lays its 
hold upon our hearts ; it is the qualities of a per- 
son, his greatness or his goodness, the excel- 
lence of his virtue, the charm of his charity and 
the benignity of his life. 

It is thus we love the absent, whom we can 
never forget, the father, the mother, the brother, 
the friend. Our memory is a casket of their 
graces, their habits, their kindly words, their ten- 
der deeds, their noble or beautiful example. 

Toward our fellows love is an obligation. 
That love is qualified by their imperfection; but 
our own equal inperfection teaches us forbear- 
ance. Love toward Christ saddens with no dis- 
appointment, needs no repentance, demands no 
reserve. 



99 



XLIIL 

THE WHITE STONE. 

"To HIM THAT OVERCOMETH WIU, I GIVE TO 
EAT OE THE HIDDEN MANNA AND I WIU, GIVE 
HIM A WHITE STONE, AND IN THE STONE A NEW 
NAME WRITTEN, WHICH NO MAN KNOWETH SAV- 
ING HE that rEcEiveth it." There are two com- 
mon interpretations of these words which we 
may consider and then dismiss them for a third. 
Judges of old cast a white pebble into an urn 
to signify their acquittal of an accused person 
and a black one to say that he was condemned. 
The white stone given here to him that over- 
cometh would then mean his justification and 
release. 

Again, when a conqueror in public games was 
conducted with pomp to his city he was furnished 
with a white stone with his name inscribed on it, 
which entitled him to maintenance for life at the 
public expense. The stone, because square in 
shape, was called a tessera. A variety of this kind 
was the tessera of hospitality-?^ pledge of friend- 
ship, of alliance between two persons. An oblong 
100 



piece of wood or stone or ivory was divided into 
two equal parts or squares, on which each of the 
parties wrote his own name and then exchanged 
it with the other. It was carefully preserved and 
handed down even for generations in the same 
family. When a member of the family travelled, 
he could, on producing his piece have a claim to 
hospitality and kind treatment from the other 
party to the contract. 

The white stone is best interpreted thus : 
Within the chosen or square embroidered breast- 
plate of judgment, doubled or folded back 
upon itself to be a receptacle like a purse for 
some precious thing, and worn by the high 
priest, there were twelve precious stones, on each 
of which was the name of a tribe engraven. 
None but the high priest knew the name written 
on the white stone. But the new name now 
written there, is Jesus. 



101 



XLIV. 

A VANISHING FIGURE. 

"Their Eyes WERE opened, they knew him 
and HE vanished." We do not always recog- 
nize the worth of a familiar treasure or estimate 
its excellence aright until it is about to pass away. 
Firdausi might suffer unheeded while living, 
and his contribution of the Shahnameh to the 
world's epic literature be prized only when he 
had mouldered to dust. From the soul of his 
genius a hungry bard has often sung to the ears 
of parsimony that neglected to give him bread; 
and a future generation has written the memo- 
rial of his merits on a cold slab of stone. 

To live in the visible presence of our divine 
Lord was a delight, to look on that serious face 
suffused with the glow of love; to hear His 
heavenly wisdom in the music of His tender 
speech, to feel the ineffable safety of one's soul 
near His holy person was a joy to be renewed 
only amid the fruition of eternal pleasures and 
enhanced by the vision of the fullness of His 
glory. Then He will "abide with us" and we 
with Him, not because "it is toward evening," 
but because the everlasting "day is at hand," in 
all its effulgence. 

102 



A lovely scene, when once familiar, may be 
almost disregarded either through the dulness of 
our indifference or because our minds, aspiring 
ever, conceive of scenery still more beautiful. A 
hero may lack dignity and grandeur in the eye 
of his attendant either because the soul of the 
inferior has no sympathy with true greatness or 
because he sees the deformities which disfigure 
the character of his master. And often both the 
scenes we admire and the persons we love have 
other virtues, veiled to careless eyes, which we 
prize when we are about to lose them, as the 
plumes of birds in the tropics, whose beauty is 
hidden when their wings are folded, "brighten 
as they take their flight." 



103 



XLV. 
TIME FOR VIGILANCE. 

"But tarry ye in the City of Jerusalem 
until ye be endued with power from on 
high/' Take a single instance in the mythology 
of the Pagans. When Romulus had disappeared 
and the people were anxious for his fate, the 
patricians bade them to be quiet and not curious, 
and told them that Romulus had been caught up 
in the skies and that they should honor and wor- 
ship him, for that he who had been a gracious 
king to the Romans would now be their propi- 
tious deity. But this exaltation or ascension is 
evidently a figment, because it was altogether 
unseen, and it deserves only to be classed among 
the fables of heathenism. 

But the ascension of our Lord was visible. 
There was the human body, born of Mary, risen 
from the dead, partaking of material food, wear- 
ing the remembered features, looking with the 
eyes of love, speaking with the lips of wisdom, 
blessing with the wounded hands, ascending be- 
104 



fore the throng of His disciples, overcoming air 
and cloud with superhuman power. 

It is as the loss of day to one who seated in 
his chamber watches from his window the sink- 
ing sun, the fading of the tints of beauty and of 
glory from the west, the stealing of gray twi- 
light over all the landscape, the dark and chill 
descent of night. We think, bereaved, when 
shall the Sun of righteousness arise with cheer 
and radiance in his healing beams? 

How well we remember the absent whom we 
love ! Each word we recall is precious. We 
cherish his promises. A friend from his pres- 
ence is greeted with welcome and honored with 
hospitality. We look with avidity for his mes- 
sages and grasp and open his letters with an 
eager hand. We long for the return of the 
lover of our souls, we will tarry for him. 



105 



XLVI. 
TIME FOR WORK. 

"Ye men of Galilee why stand ye gazing 
up into heaven? This same Jesus, which is 
taken up from you into heaven, shall so 
come in like manner as ye have seen him 
GO into heaven." "The next natural hope of 
a child after departure of his father on a journey 
is his coming." 

It would ill comport with Jesus' own lessons 
if, in looking long after our Lord as he ascends, 
we neglect those chastening, charitable, fruitful 
toils that fit us by His grace to live that higher 
life with Him. The angels said, "Ye men of 
Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into the 
heavens?" So, checking their wonder and their 
musing, they returned to active life, to arduous 
toil. 

We come back from Olivet, our eyes dazzled 

with images of heavenly felicities and all things 

here seem poor and miserable by the contrast; 

but in these same meaner haunts and lowly 

106 



works we fit ourselves for endless blessedness in 
brighter mansions. A little longer in our homes 
of clay, working for Jesus, molding our will 
in harmony with His, and we shall surrender to 
Him our souls in perfect faith and hope and love. 

Coleridge knelt as he looked from the vale of 
Chamouni upward and far upward on that 
massive mountain, king among the Alps, whose 
white mantle and snowy summit give it its 
name. His sight pierced the light vapor that 
hid its head and rose higher and still higher until 
it seemed to mingle with the sky and melt into 
the Deity. The vision filled him with awe and 
raised him to devotion. 

Jesus is our precursor. Through the skies He 
has tracked for us His triumphal way to the 
portals of His palace, whence He rules us 
and where He awaits us. 

His last words spoken to us on earth, with a 
word of benediction, loaded the air with the 
music of His blessing. 

Let us "in heart and mind thither ascend and 
with Him continually dwell. 5 ' 



107 



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